Where Is Fancy Bred?

Post   : Where Is Fancy Bred?
URL    : http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2013/08/24/where-is-fancy-bred/
Posted : August 24, 2013 at 10:00 am
Author : Jon Awbrey

Re: Fitness Landscapes as Mental and Mathematical Models of Evolution
At: http://egtheory.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/fitness-landscapes/

The question of “mental models” has occupied my thoughts for quite a while.

As intelligent agents with a capacity for inquiry, we have ways of forming
and transforming independent representations of reality — “reality” being
one of many names we give the imagined source of impressions that persist
in impressing themselves on us and that we sort on a trial basis to the
bins of our external and internal worlds.

As social agents with a capacity for communication, we have ways of impressing
our personal representations on external media and sharing them with other
sign-using agents, with all the contingencies and difficulties that bedevil
our partly phylogenetic and partly ontogenetic capacity for sharing signs.

I tend to come at these questions from a system-theoretic direction, asking
“Where is the threshold of system-theoretic complexity that must be crossed
in order to achieve the first signs of these capacities?”

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